Production Archive: 2016-2017

September 23-24 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater

The Life and Death of Queen Margaret is a “new” Shakespeare play created and performed by Western Massachusetts-based ensemble Real Live Theatre. This piece, which centers around the life of Margaret of Anjou,liberates some of Shakespeare’s most poignant feminist writing from a series of plays about men and their experience of history, and illuminates that buried brilliance, amplifying and celebrating a female character who is complex, passionate, powerful, and one of the greatest antiheroes Shakespeare ever created. This dance-theatre adaptation, co-created and directed by Colby Visiting Assistant Professor Toby Vera Bercovici, combines extant scenes from Henry VI Parts I, II, and III, scenes which are a patchwork of multiple Shakespeare plays, and occasional adaptor-written chunks of iambic pentameter. It features a cast of eight extraordinary female performers.

In partnership with the Center for the Arts and Humanities.

By Alexis Atkinson ’15

October 7-8 at 8:00 p.m.
Strider Theater

Constellations is a multimedia theater piece that aims to reflect and track the psychological and emotional development of a young black female. The one-woman play utilizes different modes of storytelling–prose, narrative anecdote, spoken word, and poetry–to explore the depth of how one can experience marginalization. An unnamed Lead takes the audience on a tour through the Garden of Dreams, a holding space for unrealized aspirations and the unresolved past. The piece travels through time and space to capture wrestling with identity politics throughout crucial moments of development and self discovery. In spite being hopeful for a better future, how does one navigate oppression on a moment to moment basis? What if anything actually grows in the Garden of Dreams?

In partnership with the Pugh Center, College and Student Advancement, and the Center for the Arts and Humanities.

By Henrik Ibsen
Translated from the Norwegian by Paul Walsh

November 17-19 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater

The Master Builder is one of the later plays of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, known around the world as “the father of Modern Drama.” It tells the story of aging architect Halvard Solness, a man who fears being made obsolete by the younger generation, and his encounter with Hilde Wangel, a young woman come knocking on his door to claim a prize which once he promised her. The dense fabric of this play blends realism, symbolism, and magic to explore hubris, madness, and the dynamics between generations. Colby Teaching Artist Bess Welden plays Halvard Solness.

December 2-3 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater

This concert features a collection of new works. A highlight, the now annual First Year Dance Project, this year will be choreographed by senior Theater and Dance Majors Leah Bilodeau and Kathryn Butler with light design by Lucy Soucek ’18. The evening will also feature new work by Teaching Artists Orlando Hunter and Ricarrdo Valentine of Brotherhood Dance; outcomes of Professor Sonja Thomas’ Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance course; and a significant new work directed by Professor Annie Kloppenberg featuring student performers from Colby’s Collaborative Company course. That work will take as its inspiration Picasso’s Vollard Suite, a recent acquisition by the Colby Museum of Art.

Book and Lyrics by Katie Monteleone ’18
Music by Josua Lutian ’18 and Ben Brougham ’18

February 9-11 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater

Lost With You is a new musical that tells the story of a family of four who never seem to be in sync with one another. Emulating her mother as a successful owner of a local iced tea company, Juliette sells lemonade in the hopes of one day getting out of the small town and becoming somebody. Meanwhile, Juliette’s older brother Jerome spends his days playing chess alone, never having felt like he belonged anywhere. When a new boy named Nick moves into town, everything changes. Jerome suddenly finds himself lost in the possibility of having met someone who makes him feel something real for the first time. A heartwarming story about family and acceptance, Lost With You explores what it means to find happiness in a place you never thought you would.

Co-produced with the Department of Music.
In partnership with the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the Meehan Family Theater and Dance Fund, and the Center for the Arts and Humanities.

March 10-11 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater

The Spring Dance Concert features guest artist Christal Brown’s company in The Opulence of Integrity and Residents of Infinite Space; an Honors Thesis by Senior Theater and Dance Major Kathryn Butler. Butler’s multi-phased and multi-faceted work takes a complex look at collaborative creative processes both in person and via mediated experience, and this project merges the research of multiple student choreographers and performers into a new work showcasing her signature athleticism that fascination with differently trained bodies in pragmatic puzzle-solving.

Inspired by boxing’s outspoken superstar Muhammad Ali’s career as a boxer and life as a social activist, public martyr, and human being, The Opulence of Integrity deploys eclectic movement and multiple media to illustrate the turmoil of a life infused by divinity yet misinterpreted by humanity. By using Ali as an archetype, The Opulence of Integrity explores the struggle for identity for men of color in the United States with an intimate and expansive look at social, economic, and spiritual trappings that prohibit freedom. Brown pours her own experience into the work and dedicates it to her father, brother, and uncle who, in her words, “fought but did not win” and to her son “whose battle has not yet begun.”

By Sarah Ruhl

April 21-22 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater

Mary, foundering in her romantic relationship, meets a female cowboy who becomes her escape. Late, A Cowboy Song is a play about art, soup, and the freedom of learning to ride a horse. The text is lean and beautiful and includes live music. This production will be helmed by the students of the Directing class, each one tackling a part of the whole. They will work in collaboration with students from the Introduction to Design class to create a series of unique worlds, strung together as a full production.

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